Subject: Re: git format-patch should honor notes

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:24:18 +0100

Johan Herland venit, vidit, dixit 08.12.2010 11:12:
> On Wednesday 08 December 2010, Michael J Gruber wrote:
>> Also, in order to be really useful, I would need a place to store the
>> cover letter also. I was experimenting a while back with a design for
>> annotating branchnames which "basically" worked but haven't had time
>> to really implement it. If I remember correctly, I had to set up some
>> "bogus" refs to keep my notes from being garbage collected and was
>> still figuring out the best place to put them. I'll dig it up when I
>> have time to.
> 
> I believe the last time the issue of adding notes to branch names was 
> discussed, the consensus was that rather than using notes, they could 
> be stored using a custom entry in the config file, e.g.
> 
>   git config branch.mybranch.description "Description of mybranch"
> 
> I might have misremembered this, though.

They certainly "could". The question whether they "should" depends on
what they are used for:

- config is neither versioned nor easily shareable; perfect for your own
scratch notes to go away once work is done

- notes are versioned and can be shared (I don't need to tell you...);
perfect for longer term annotations you want to keep

Note that "sharing" here includes also pushing to your backup repo and
cloning around. I'd certainly put patch series cover letters in the
second category.

Michael